A Pirates Return?

Michael Weinrab looks at the Pirates and their lost generation:

Baseball in Pittsburgh dates back to the 19th century, but the first turning point came in 1909, when Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss, a Kentucky bourbon distiller, built Forbes Field in Oakland, an up-and-coming section of the city being developed by Andrew Carnegie. He believed his park could appeal to a more upscale clientele; his critics labeled it "Dreyfuss's Folly." But Forbes Field sold out on Opening Day, and the Pirates won the 1909 World Series, and 51 years later, in that same ballpark, Bill Mazeroski drove a 1-0 pitch from Ralph Terry over the left-field wall to win Game 7 of the World Series over the Yankees. It is a moment they still commemorate every October 13 by playing the broadcast of the game over a loudspeaker at the site of the outfield wall of Forbes Field.
That sentimental attachment to sports is what carried Pittsburgh through the lean times. When the city began to redefine itself as the steel mills moved out, the Steelers were a model NFL franchise, but there were enough people who remembered the Mazeroski home run or the Roberto Clemente years or the "We Are Family" World Series champion Pirates of 1979 that Pittsburgh refused to completely let go of its relationship with baseball. In order to maintain their status as a first-class city, they needed a baseball team as much as they needed a world-class symphony. And so they never fully gave in to apathy: The failures of the Pirates have always bothered people, even as those failures have dragged on for a generation. There is a reason all the sports teams in Pittsburgh wear black and gold; in some way, they are inexorably linked, and so the Pirates' mounting losses contrasted with the comeback of Pittsburgh itself over the past two decades. Here was this beautiful new ballpark, in this revived North Shore neighborhood: Why can't we get the product right?
"People care enough to get mad about the things that went wrong," Madarasz says. "That's Pittsburgh — we try and we try and we try, until we succeed."

When he talks about game 7 of the 1992 NLCS, I remember it mostly because there were several Pirates fans and Braves fans who were buddies watching the game together.  One of the Braves fans, who never failed to be a poor winner, was mocking the Pirates fans mercilessly.  I just remember the dejection all of those Pittsburgh showed, and I can only imagine how bad the last 19 years have been on them.